Lift Up Your Hearts!

I found the following list in in The Art of Manliness, a publication I rarely read, but have respect for, and not just because their site is hosted by our own Lime Daley, which also hosts this blog. Their article reprints The Children’s Morality Code for Elementary Schools from 1926, which is old enough that I have no qualms about reproducing it here. You're unlikely to see these rules for being a good American in any public elementary school today, more's the pity.  I believe I can heartily endorse all the precepts, except for the penultimate, XI-2:  I will be loyal to my school.  I supposed one has to expect that, given that this list was intended for school children, but I see no particular reason for loyalty to a school any more than to a favorite grocery store or brand of jeans.

As for the rest of them, I say we should bring them back, beginning with our politicians.

THE ELEMENTARY MORALITY OF CIVILIZATION

Boys and girls who are good Americans try to become strong and useful, worthy of their nation, that our country may become ever greater and better. Therefore, they obey the laws of right living which the best Americans have always obeyed.

I. THE LAW OF SELF-CONTROL

GOOD AMERICANS CONTROL THEMSELVES

Those who best control themselves can best serve their country.

1. I will control my tongue, and will not allow it to speak mean, vulgar, or profane words. I will think before I speak. I will tell the truth and nothing but the truth.

2. I will control my temper, and will not get angry when people or things displease me. Even when indignant against wrong and contradicting falsehood, I will keep my self-control.

3. I will control my thoughts, and will not allow a foolish wish to spoil a wise purpose.

4. I will control my actions. I will be careful and thrifty, and insist on doing right.

5. I will not ridicule nor defile the character of another; I will keep my self-respect, and help others to keep theirs.

II. THE LAW OF GOOD HEALTH

GOOD AMERICANS TRY TO GAIN AND KEEP GOOD HEALTH

The welfare of our country depends upon those who are physically fit for their daily work. Therefore:

1. I will try to take such food, sleep, and exercise as will keep me always in good health.

2. I will keep my clothes, my body, and my mind clean.

3. I will avoid those habits which would harm me, and will make and never break those habits which will help me.

4. I will protect the health of others, and guard their safety as well as my own.

5. I will grow strong and skillful.

III. THE LAW OF KINDNESS

GOOD AMERICANS ARE KIND

In America those who are different must live in the same communities. We are of many different sorts, but we are one great people. Every unkindness hurts the common life; every kindness helps. Therefore:

1. I will be kind in all my thoughts. I will bear no spites or grudges. I will never despise anybody.

2. I will be kind in all my speech. I will never gossip nor will I speak unkindly of any one. Words may wound or heal.

3. I will be kind in my acts. I will not selfishly insist on having my own way. I will be polite: rude people are not good Americans. I will not make unnecessary trouble for those who work for me, nor forget to be grateful. I will be careful of other people’s things. I will do my best to prevent cruelty, and will give help to those who are in need.

IV. THE LAW OF SPORTSMANSHIP

GOOD AMERICANS PLAY FAIR

Strong play increases and trains one’s strength and courage. Sportsmanship helps one to be a gentleman, a lady. Therefore:

1. I will not cheat; I will keep the rules, but I will play the game hard, for the fun of the game, to win by strength and skill. If I should not play fair, the loser would lose the fun of the game, the winner would lose his self-respect, and the game itself would become a mean and often cruel business.

2. I will treat my opponents with courtesy, and trust them if they deserve it. I will be friendly.

3. If I play in a group game, I will play, not for my own glory, but for the success of my team.

4. I will be a good loser or a generous winner.

5. And in my work as well as in my play, I will be sportsmanlike—generous, fair, honorable.

V. THE LAW OF SELF-RELIANCE

GOOD AMERICANS ARE SELF-RELIANT

Self-conceit is silly, but self-reliance is necessary to boys and girls who would be strong and useful.

1. I will gladly listen to the advice of older and wiser people; I will reverence the wishes of those who love and care for me, and who know life and me better than I. I will develop independence and wisdom to choose for myself, act for myself, according to what seems right and fair and wise.

2. I will not be afraid of being laughed at when I am right. I will not be afraid of doing right when the crowd does wrong.

3. When in danger, trouble, or pain, I will be brave. A coward does not make a good American.

VI. THE LAW OF DUTY

GOOD AMERICANS DO THEIR DUTY

The shirker and the willing idler live upon others, and burden fellow-citizens with work unfairly. They do not do their share, for their country’s good.

I will try to find out what my duty is, what I ought to do as a good American, and my duty I will do, whether it is easy or hard. What it is my duty to do I can do.

VII. THE LAW OF RELIABILITY

GOOD AMERICANS ARE RELIABLE

Our country grows great and good as her citizens are able more fully to trust each other. Therefore:

1. I will be honest in every act, and very careful with money. I will not cheat nor pretend, nor sneak.

2. I will not do wrong in the hope of not being found out. I can not hide the truth from myself. Nor will I injure the property of others.

3. I will not take without permission what does not belong to me. A thief is a menace to me and others.

4. I will do promptly what I have promised to do. If I have made a foolish promise, I will at once confess my mistake, and I will try to make good any harm which my mistake may have caused. I will speak and act that people will find it easier to trust each other.

VIII. THE LAW OF TRUTH

GOOD AMERICANS ARE TRUE

1. I will be slow to believe suspicions lest I do injustice; I will avoid hasty opinions lest I be mistaken as to facts.

2. I will stand by the truth regardless of my likes and dislikes, and scorn the temptation to lie for myself or friends: nor will I keep the truth from those who have a right to it.

3. I will hunt for proof, and be accurate as to what I see and hear; I will learn to think, that I may discover new truth.

IX. THE LAW OF GOOD WORKMANSHIP

GOOD AMERICANS TRY TO DO THE RIGHT THING IN THE RIGHT WAY

The welfare of our country depends upon those who have learned to do in the right way the work that makes civilization possible. Therefore:

1. I will get the best possible education, and learn all that I can as a preparation for the time when I am grown up and at my life work. I will invent and make things better if I can.

2. I will take real interest in work, and will not be satisfied to do slipshod, lazy, and merely passable work. I will form the habit of good work and keep alert; mistakes and blunders cause hardships, sometimes disaster, and spoil success.

3. I will make the right thing in the right way to give it value and beauty, even when no one else sees or praises me. But when I have done my best, I will not envy those who have done better, or have received larger reward. Envy spoils the work and the worker.

X. THE LAW OF TEAM-WORK

GOOD AMERICANS WORK IN FRIENDLY COOPERATION WITH FELLOW-WORKERS

One alone could not build a city or a great railroad. One alone would find it hard to build a bridge. That I may have bread, people have sowed and reaped, people have made plows and threshers, have built mills and mined coal, made stoves and kept stores. As we learn how to work together, the welfare of our country is advanced.

1. In whatever work I do with others, I will do my part and encourage others to do their part, promptly.

2. I will help to keep in order the things which we use in our work. When things are out of place, they are often in the way, and sometimes they are hard to find.

3. In all my work with others, I will be cheerful. Cheerlessness depresses all the workers and injures all the work.

4. When I have received money for my work, I will be neither a miser nor a spendthrift. I will save or spend as one of the friendly workers of America.

XI. THE LAW OF LOYALTY

GOOD AMERICANS ARE LOYAL

If our America is to become ever greater and better, her citizens must be loyal, devotedly faithful, in every relation of life; full of courage and regardful of their honor.

1. I will be loyal to my family. In loyalty I will gladly obey my parents or those who are in their place, and show them gratitude. I will do my best to help each member of my family to strength and usefulness.

2. I will be loyal to my school. In loyalty I will obey and help other pupils to obey those rules which further the good of all.

3. I will be loyal to my town, my state, my country. In loyalty I will respect and help others to respect their laws and their courts of justice.

"How do you decide what to write?" I know that other writers have been asked this and similar questions, and I don't speak for anyone else, but for me this is not the problem. The question I wrestle with constantly is, How do I decide what NOT to write? I find it more like sculpture: somewhere inside that big block of marble is an angel; the trick is to know what to take away (paraphrasing Michelangelo).

Earlier this year, I set out to declutter and organize the nearly 400 links that I had bookmarked and saved in a folder called simply, "Write." For years, whenever I had come across an article, or a podcast, or a blog post, or a news event that inspired me to write, but which I couldn't deal with immediately, I dumped it into the Write bucket. That folder was my closet, my attic, my basement, and it was no easier to clean out than any of those physical locations.

As with physical accumulations, some things were easier to deal with than others. Some links had been taken down, or put behind pay walls, so "delete" was an easy option. Other subjects were too topical and had become out of date. Delete. It was harder to deal with subjects that were still interesting to me, but which I knew would be less so to most of my readers; they'd be fine for filling in on a slow news day, but I haven't had one of those in months, and I've been accumulating a large stock of more interesting fill-ins anyway. Delete, if somewhat reluctantly. Ditto for the stories and videos that didn't quite express themselves as well on a second look as they had at first. I could have filled in the missing pieces—but I'm not looking for extra work!

That process whittled my stock down by about half. I was determined not to leave the rest as simple bookmarks. If they were worth keeping, they were worth starting blog posts for, if it were but to create a title, give it a category, and put the link in the post body, saving the result as a draft in my blog software. Sometimes I would then get inspired, and make a good start on the post. Sometimes I even completed it.

You guessed it: I have returned to my earlier practice. If I have an idea I create the beginnings of a blog post and save it as a draft. I'm not sure that's an improvement over the Write folder, although it's a little more organized. But now I have well over 200 blog posts in various stages of completion. If I were to publish one a day it would take more than half a year to go through them all. And that's only if I never get inspired to write something new—which we all know just isn't going to happen as long as I'm conscious.

I don't have to bring them all to completion; they're there to provide inspiration. But I must write. Writing is how I communicate; writing is my therapy; writing is how I relax. Writing is how I think. More than that, while many of my posts are personal, light-hearted, or trivial—though good humor is anything but trivial—I often cover serious subjects, and believe I need to make available to others whatever knowledge and wisdom I've gathered in my long years. That may sound arrogant, but what's the point of learning and experience if you don't share it? I feel this especially strongly because I"m aware that nearly all of the good ideas I've implemented in my life were inspired by someone else—usually what someone else has written.

To use the old-fashioned term, I also believe I am called to speak out, and as long as this is my calling, I must write. The question, always, is not so much what to write, as what to leave behind. For that, the pressures of time and everyday life are for better or worse the broadest chisel: better in that I'm forced to prioritize; worse because it biases what I publish away from what takes long, hard work to write. Maybe that's not all bad; every diet needs variety. I pretty much follow my gut, keep praying to be useful, and hope that enough of the time I can distinguish a piece of stone from the feather of an angel's wing.

I have been expressing my thoughts online since the end of the last century. In 2015 I set myself a goal of writing at least 10 posts each month, or about one every three days. This I have done without fail for more than 10 years. My posts now total over 3500, more than half of that since 2015. Sometimes I write a lot more than 10 posts per month, due to an inundation of noteworthy events on every level, from personal to international. Sometimes I must work harder to meet my goal, when the necessities of life make finding time to write difficult.

I do fear overwhelming my audience. But that's the beauty of the blog format: it's up to the audience if, when, and how much to read. Lord willin' and the creek don't rise, should someone eventually have time and interest in what I have to say, it will be found here, patiently waiting. I'm called to write, I'm called to speak the truth as I've been given to see it—but I'm not called to convince anyone of anything. Changing other people is above my pay grade.

So, yeah. That's what goes through my mind when someone asks, How do you decide what to write?

This research comes from Carnegie Mellon University, so it must be good, right?  In these days, as the cracks in our system of scientific funding, research, reviewing, and reporting are becoming evident, it's nice to find results I can embrace wholeheartedly.

In a carefully controlled laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, researchers exposed more than 400 healthy volunteers to the common cold virus. However, before the viral exposure, researchers spent two weeks meticulously tracking something most scientists might overlook: whether the participants had been hugged each day. ... Participants who were hugged on most days had about 60 percent lower odds of becoming infected than those who were rarely hugged. Additionally, those who did get sick recovered more quickly and had stronger immune responses than those who received fewer hugs.

When we hug someone, a cascade of events unfolds in our bodies and brains, affecting us on multiple levels—neurobiological, neurochemical, and social. Neurobiologically, hugging stimulates a network of sensory nerves under the skin, particularly a specialized group called C-tactile afferents, sometimes referred to as “cuddle nerves.” ... When triggered, cuddle nerves also release endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers that help boost mood. ... On a neurochemical level, hugging triggers the release of several “feel-good” chemicals. Chief among these is oxytocin ... which enhances feelings of bonding, trust, and safety. In addition, hugging releases dopamine, which is associated with pleasure, and serotonin, which stabilizes mood and promotes happiness. From a social and psychological standpoint, hugs convey support without the need for words, serving as nonverbal affirmations of shared emotion, reinforcing social bonds.

Hug duration was also considered in the study.

When researchers tested different types of hug styles and durations, they discovered precise requirements: one-second hugs felt unsatisfying and provided minimal benefit. At the same time, five to 10 seconds proved optimal before longer contact became uncomfortable. For intimate relationships, 20-second embraces produce the strongest measurable effects.

The article does not specifically mention one vital category of hugs: those between parents and their young children. (And grandma hugs!  Never forget the regenerative power of grandma hugs!) Possibly it was included in the "intimate relationships" category, but I'm inclined to suspect that there were not enough people in the parent/child cohort for meaningful data. Many university studies are done on their captive audience of college students; I'd like to know the demographics of their volunteers.

Read the whole article for more, including previous studies. Here's one from 2003:

Couples who had 10 minutes of hand holding followed by a 20-second hug with their partner before giving a speech had lower blood pressure and heart rate by half compared with those who sat quietly without contact. These results suggest that affectionate touch provides physiological protection, which partially explains the heart health benefits associated with supportive relationships.

Are you a bit short on the opportunity for hugs in your life? Do not despair!

Regular affectionate contact produces benefits that extend far beyond stress reduction and a healthier heart. People who receive consistent physical comfort—whether from humans, pets, or even weighted blankets—sleep more soundly and wake more refreshed than those lacking such contact.

Tom Lehrer didn't quite make it to his 100th birthday, and I'm sure he could have written a song about that.

I discovered him when I was in junior high school, and his album That Was the Year That Was is one of the few records I owned before marriage.  I can't say as my parents approved of all of the songs—in retrospect I can see why—but they generally put up with my adolescent idiosyncracies.

Here's a great obituary for Lehrer from The Economist, cleverly interwoven with lines from his multitudinous satirical songs.  You can read it for free, but you have to jump through a bunch of hoops that may or may not be worth the trouble.  You need to enter, not just the usual name and e-mail address, but also your profession and industry.  Worse, you have to fit your life into their limited boxes, which has never been easy for me.  "Retired" and "Homemaker" are not options.  On the other hand, writing homeschool reports has made me pretty good at stuffing whatever it was we were doing into conventional terminology.

His childhood had been a breeze of maths and music, with a preference for Broadway shows. He entered Harvard at 15 and graduated at 18, the sort of student who brought books of logical puzzles to dinner in hall, and, on the piano in his room, liked to play Rachmaninov with his left hand in one key and his right a semitone lower, making his friends grimace. He seemed bound for a glittering mathematical career, but then the songs erupted, written for friends but spreading by word of mouth, until he was famous. He wrote each one in a trice and performed, increasingly, in night clubs. By contrast his PhD, on the concept of the mode, vaguely occupied him for 15 years before he abandoned it.

Oh fame! Oh accolades! He had toured the world and packed out Carnegie Hall. Yes, they really panted to see a clean-cut Harvard graduate in horn-rimmed glasses pounding at a piano and singing: sometimes stern, sometimes morose, but often joyose, as he twisted in the knife. [Is that a typo for joyous, or a deliberate portmanteau of joyous and morose?]

When he suddenly stopped, and the output dropped, he was presumed dead. No, Tom Lehrer replied. Just having fun commuting between the coasts, teaching maths for a quarter of the year, ie the winter, at the University of California in sunny Santa Cruz, and spending the rest of the time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, being lazy. Never having to shovel snow; never having to see snow. And, being said to be dead, avoiding junk mail.

I wonder how he managed the last.  We're still getting junk mail for Porter's father, who has been actually dead for six years.

Did he ever have hopes of extending the frontier of scientific knowledge? Noooooo, unless you counted his Gilbert & Sullivan setting of the entire periodic table. He would rather retract it, if anything. He still taught maths, along with musical theatre, and that was his career. He had never wanted attention from people applauding his singing in the dark. His solitary, strictly private life made him happy; to fame he was indifferent. In 2020 he told everyone they could help themselves to his song rights. As for him, he returned to his puzzle books, as if he had never strayed.

Requiescat in pace, Tom Lehrer. Thanks for all the fun.

It began as a student project by Professor Jamie Rector's class at the University of California, Berkeley. They wanted to investigate methane emissions from abandoned and sealed oil wells. What the students discovered could turn the approach to California's environmental concerns on its head.

As they researched California’s abandoned oil wells, Rector’s students discovered an abundance of natural oil seeps located above the same fields—and came to a surprising conclusion. Geologically driven, natural oil seeps are a major contributor to California’s greenhouse emissions, they say. And drilling—long seen as the problem, not the answer—might be a panacea for emissions.

Natural seeps occur when liquid oil and gas leak to the Earth’s surface, both on land and under water. California sits on actively moving tectonic plates, which create fractured reservoirs and pathways for the oil to escape. ... Waters off Southern California are rife with seeps, and oil and gas fields ... have some of the highest natural hydrocarbon seep rates in the world, emitting gases such as methane, as well as toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs). But these geologically driven seeps, Rector notes, have been largely unaccounted for in assessing how oil production fields contribute to California’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“There are hundreds of studies linking oil and gas fields to greenhouse gas emissions, to cancer rates, to climate justice, to groundwater pollution and everything else,” said Rector. “And yet none of these studies ever considered the possibility that it wasn’t from equipment or production, but natural seeps above the oil fields.” ... Rector’s team calculates that natural seeps, together with orphaned wells, produce 50 times more methane emissions than oil and gas equipment leaks in Southern California.

If seeps are driving emissions above oil fields, Rector reasons, plugging abandoned wells may do little to help pollution. In fact, he posits, the only demonstrated way to reduce natural seep emissions is by depleting underlying reservoirs—that is, by drilling.

Pointing to studies showing that oil production has reduced and even eliminated seeps, he suggests California’s current regulatory environment may be counterproductive.
“The crazy thing is, by stopping oil and gas production in California, after we’ve regulated and really gotten equipment emissions way down, we may be increasing seep emissions,” Rector said. “Because these seeps come up through the oil and gas fields, and the only way to stop it is by producing oil.”

The article is much longer than these excerpts, and the situation is of course complex, both scientifically and politically, but I see it as yet another demonstration of the truth that simplistic solutions with the best of intentions often lead to harmful, unintended consequences.

Here's an interesting look at attempts to replace farms and ranches with industrial food production facilities.

I'm not totally against efforts to use technology to create flesh; I'm quite excited about the possibility of using 3D printers to create hearts, kidneys, and other organs for those who need them. That, too, is still a far-off dream, but it sure beats re-defining death so that more organs can be harvested for transplant, as was recently suggested in the New York Times. (The link will be useless to you if, like me, you can't get into the NYT, but you can see the headline.)

The main reason I like that video is how it reveals the incredible complexities of natural life, which we take for granted until we try to mimic them. Lab-grown meat is no more likely to replicate—in taste or nutrition—a fire-grilled steak from a purely grass-fed steer than vanillin can replace a vanilla bean, or oat milk the marvellous liquid that comes from a well-tended cow.

Here's another Imprimis article I enjoyed, Victor Davis Hanson's 2025 commencement address for Hillsdale College.

Some excerpts:

Harvard University suddenly wishes to be free of Washington, D.C.—at least as long as the current administration remains in office. ... In answer, the public has been directing Harvard to consult Hillsdale, whose model disavowal of federal funding is long-standing and principled. Hillsdale’s declination of government money does not hinge on any particular administration, Republican or Democrat, being in power. Instead, Hillsdale has taken the position that the federal government should not dictate to private colleges, and that to ensure its independence, Hillsdale will neither seek nor accept taxpayer subsidies.

You students of the Class of 2025 have been instructed in, have absorbed fully, and will pass on a code of honorable conduct that has become a natural part of who you are. ... Hillsdale has taught you not to worry if you are not one with the current majority of youth, because you are certainly one with most of the past—and future—generations. ... Because your values are real, permanent, and ancient, you will not be won over by those who justify their lapses of behavior by situational ethics or feelings of victimization. Without such individual vows of honesty and compassion for others, civilization in aggregate cannot be sustained. It instead descends into the age-old banes of tribalism, disunity, and chaos.

Much of our society’s current crisis derives from this personal refusal or inability to respect the property of others, to tell the truth, to stand up to the bully, to protect the weaker, and to end each day in contemplation that you were more a moral force for the common good than either a neutral observer or on the wrong side of the ethical ledger. When individual behavior and decorum falter, so does a country, which is, after all, only the common reflection of millions of its individuals.

So often in the age of presentism, we in our narcissism and arrogance confuse our technical and material successes with automatic moral progress. We seem unaware that thinkers of the past ... worried about just the opposite: they worried that material progress and greater wealth would result in moral regress, given the greater opportunities to gratify the appetites with perceived fewer consequences and to use sophistry to excuse the sin.

Without traditional reverence for the past, an ungrateful nation not only suffers a loss of knowledge but is plagued by hubris—so often the twin of ignorance—believing that it alone has discovered ideas and behaviors unique to itself and its own era, when they are in fact ancient.

Key to the endangered idea of reverence for the past is a recognition that it is neither fair nor just to dismiss easily those of earlier generations based solely on the standards of the present. ... The Hillsdale reverence for the Western tradition and the American past is a reminder that we should not easily condemn and erase the dead, lest we and our times be judged capriciously by future generations and found wanting—whether for the medievalism of our dangerous cities, the electronic cruelty of the Internet, or the fragmentation of the family.

Your generation is now witness to a counterrevolution of sorts. Millions of Americans are asking for a reexamination of our culture and society with an eye to restoring ancient decency and looking to the good of past generations. Critical to this restoration is your optimism. Such positivity is the child of gratitude for all that we have inherited and all that we wish to enhance and pass on to others not yet born. With optimism and confidence in the citizenry, a civilization grows rather than shrinks. It becomes secure, not depressed or beset by self-loathing. It looks to the future with reverence for the past, rather than with shame or hatred.

The strength of this country ... has always been its singular ability to remain not just unshaken, but confident in its values, its resilience, and its inherent strength to overcome all challenges.